Curator of Born Digital Special Collections

The Curator of Born Digital Special Collections is a member of Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) at Vanderbilt University and is responsible for the active curation, management, and long‑term preservation of born‑digital and digitized materials within SCUA collections. This position delivers Vanderbilt’s ability to collect, preserve, and provide access to unique contemporary digital materials that are critical to teaching, learning, and research in Vanderbilt that might otherwise be lost.

Reporting to the Associate Director for Digital Special Collections, the Curator collaborates daily with SCUA subject specialists, librarians, faculty, donors, and campus IT colleagues, to acquire, curate, preserve and provide access to born‑digital and digitized manuscript collections spanning literature, journalism, politics, music, oral history, medicine, and social activism; the curator collaborates closely with the University Archivist and university administrators to preserve the digital records of Vanderbilt University, including university websites, Board of Trust and Chancellors records.

The Curator will work with SCUA curators, library staff, faculty, and external donors, to acquire, accession, arrange, describe, preserve, and provide access to born‑digital materials in a wide range of formats across all SCUA collecting areas.

In close collaboration with colleagues in Library Technology and Assessment Services (LTAS) and other library units, the Curator will lead the management, ongoing implementation, and use of digital preservation and digital forensics technologies within SCUA, including the further development and management of Vanderbilt University’s web archiving program.

The Curator will oversee the long‑term preservation and accessibility of Vanderbilt’s growing collection of digital surrogates created through SCUA’s significant investments in digitization for access, including both paper‑based and audiovisual collections.

In addition, the Curator will contribute to national and international digital preservation initiatives through the library’s participation in the Digital Preservation Coalition alongside organizations such as the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Library of Congress.

Special Collections and University Archives are part of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library System. The mission of Special Collections is “to deliver a sustainable legacy of unique cultural heritage by preserving and providing access in perpetuity to Vanderbilt University's impressive collection of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, memorabilia, audio‑visual, and institutional archives in our care whatever the format (analog or digital).”

• Collaborating with donors and the university to understand and describe the context, the material, and the intellectual content of their collections in whatever form, physical, analogue, online, or digital.
• Arranging and describing the collections to enable diverse and inclusive paths to discovery, access, and understanding of the material by scholars and the wider public.
• Preserving and stewarding the material and intellectual content of collections through proper conservation, digitization, and digital preservation.
• Giving digital and physical access to collections to as wide an audience as possible, given copyright and privacy constraints, online, internationally, and on‑site in Vanderbilt.

• Identify, evaluate, and acquire born‑digital materials for SCUA in collaboration with subject curators, librarians, university administrators, faculty, and donors.
• Develop and maintain policies, standards, procedures, and workflows for the accessioning, processing, description, preservation, and access of born‑digital materials within Special Collections and University Archives consulting with SCUA colleagues as needed.
• Collaborate with SCUA colleagues to establish and refine policies, standards, and workflows for the efficient processing, preservation, and long‑term management of digitized special collections materials produced both in‑house and through external vendors.
• Ensure…